Talk:Lin Biao
Lin Biao was a dick. I don't want to write about him. But I guess I will, for completeness's sake--tomorrow. Also, he died in Mongolia, and I'm always on the lookout for reasons to link to that underutilized article. Hmm--We could do a category for Central Committee members, if we wanted to. Turtle Fan 05:20, February 1, 2010 (UTC) :We could. I always wonder how specific we should be about nationality and party affiliation. Is it enough to say "Communist" and "Chinese" or should go that extra mile and create the "Chinese Communist Party Members" category, etc. TR 22:31, February 1, 2010 (UTC) ::We've got American Socialists so the precedent is there, but I hope we won't. We have "Chinese" because we classify characters by nationality, and "Communists" because we classify them by political affiliation. Everything's delineated quite neatly. I believe a cross-reference would actually increase ambiguity. ::Besides, we would only be able to throw together a few categories: Soviet Communists, Chinese Communists, and, thanks to Crosstime, Italian Communists. We'd be left with quite a few "orphans" anyway, for whom the reader will have to make do with "Germans" and "Communists" and put the two together. Since this is hardly a taxing procedure, I think for parallelism's sake we can also leave the Chinese Communists in the two most relevant categories. Turtle Fan 23:38, February 1, 2010 (UTC) :::The American Socialists cat is specifically Members of the US Socialist Party. And really, that came about because the Socialist Party is critical in 191. ::::It is, isn't it. Even if they did transform into the Democratic Party the instant they took office. Well not entirely--Sinclair acted like he was to the right of Hoover as far as the free market was concerned. It was probably his idea to reprint the SA books in those gynormous paperbacks and sell them for twice as much as the mass market paperbacks that GW and AE were reprinted in--books which, by the way, would give you a far higher value even if the prices were the same. ::::Actually it's probably a good thing we drew the distinction between that party and socialists in general--They're not socialists, other than Debs and Stedman and maybe the fictional characters from the first three or four books. A socialist administration would have allowed neither the high-flying stock speculation of the 1920s nor the total economic implosion of the 1930s, unless perhaps the latter was precipitated by some sort of massive crop failure or something. Turtle Fan 02:39, February 2, 2010 (UTC) :::But I agree with your overall assessment. The limited number of communist parties in HT's works would leave the category undernourished. TR 23:54, February 1, 2010 (UTC) ::::Very. I hate to see starving categories that only exist because we look the other way on their non-viability. And since we started subdividing everything, we've only got a handful of 100+ member categories. I'd like to try to protect the remaining ones--It's nice to have a few of those. Turtle Fan 02:39, February 2, 2010 (UTC) I'll write about his role in Col (and was he in the original WW books? I don't recall) later. I'm being called away but I wanted to get the framework of the article up. Don't think I'm bugging out on you. Turtle Fan 02:57, February 2, 2010 (UTC) Defectors Creating Category:Defectors would be the soul of ease. Lin Biao, Clement Vallandigham, Mary Queen of Scots, Alcibiades, Judas, William Joyce, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Karl Marx, Pascal Talon, Louis Armstrong, Wright Patman, maybe Laura Secord Moss, Straha, Ullhass, Ristin, Ussmak, a bunch of other Lizards, Jens Larssen, Heinrich Jäger, Ludmila Gorbunova, David Nussboym, Catalina Ibanez (She stayed in England after the Tudors were restored--err, after the Tudor was restored?), Habbakuk Biddiscombe, Balthasar Sinapis, a couple of Brits who joined the Atlantean army and became drill instructors (their names escape me at the moment), the Defective Mongolian Officer, and some ambiguities I'm not sure about: Confederate soldiers whose states didn't secede (there are a bunch in FP, plus Samuel Cooper, and perhaps Pembert who is of course a Pemberton analog). There are a bunch in the Krispos stories, and some MwIH guys, including the highest-ranked Soviet defector, if we want to write about him. I don't think he has an article yet.